Cultivating Complexity in an Age of Digital Dominance and Binary Oppositional Thinking

The work represented in the following essay explores meaning-making in the context of creating in a digitally saturated culture. The digital imperative, with its binary oppositional structure (ones and zeroes), has increasingly asserted itself as the only option, from learning management systems (LMSs) to nearly all financial transactions, to the deepening gulfs between very rich and very poor, to increased extremes in left- and right-wing politics, and has deepened an already-entrenched binary oppositional thinking in creativity, nature, identity, and how we imagine the future itself, i.e., the extinction ending versus the techno-utopia. Binary oppositional thinking persists when people want simple, direct answers to complex questions. We are living in such a time when anxiety and grief over climate change have left many people with deep uncertainties about the future. How might an embrace of complexity and creativity help us transmute binary oppositional thinking in the face of these challenges? Through personal and scholarly narrative, this study addresses this question through an exploration of narrative experiences.